The homunculus’ hand showed the expected connections to the hand region in the other half of the brain, as did the relevant areas of the motor cortex that control movement of the foot and mouth.

Beginning in the 1930s, scientists developed a map of this brain region called a homunculus map, depicting how different sections of the primary motor cortex controlled specific parts of the body.

It’s becoming clear that the primary motor cortex isn’t “just a simple roster of muscles down the brain that control the toes to the tongue”, he says. The idea of the homunculus dates to ...

This led him to produce a map of motor-cortex organization that many are familiar with today. It is illustrated as a homunculus — a cartoon of oddly proportioned body parts overlain on the ...

Different areas of the primary motor cortex connect to, and control, movement of different parts of the body, forming a kind of body map known as the homunculus. The size of the area on the ...

The motor cortex is organized in a way that correlates to a distorted representation of the human body called the cortical homunculus, where greater areas of the cortex are dedicated to parts of the ...